“The Beguiled,” Sofia Coppola’s new film, looks like a historical drama — it’s set in Virginia during the Civil War — but it often behaves more like a fairy tale. In the first scenes, a young girl ventures out into the woods to collect mushrooms and finds a strange man under a tree: a Union soldier with a badly wounded leg and a charming Irish brogue. Is he a prince or an ogre? (He’s Colin Farrell, which may or may not clarify the issue.)

That is only one of the questions that hover in the humid, crepuscular air. The soldier, Cpl. John McBurney by name, finds himself convalescing in a plantation house, formerly a girls’ boarding school, occupied by his rescuer, Miss Amy (Oona Laurence) and her teachers and classmates. The matriarch of the group — there are six of them in all — is Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman), who occupies an intriguing middle ground between fairy godmother and wicked stepmother, a zone that is familiar real estate for Ms. Kidman.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘The Beguiled’

Is McBurney a prisoner or a guest? Is he a threat to his hosts or is it the other way around? Who is beguiling whom? Ms. Coppola approaches these matters with her signature mix of intensity and detachment. Decorum is observed — grace is said before meals; corsets are tightened; French verbs are conjugated; everyone is called “miss” — but under the surface all kinds of strong emotions seethe and simmer. Even at midday the place has a gloomy, twilight quality. (The cinematographer is Philippe Le Sourd.) Mist and cannon smoke from a distant battlefield hang amid the Spanish moss. The atmosphere is too genteel to be gothic, but it is haunted nonetheless, by intimations of disorder, lust and violence.

“Nous sommes des filles” the girls recite during their lessons, and “The Beguiled,” which remakes and revises Don Siegel’s 1971 film (with Clint Eastwood in Mr. Farrell’s role), is in part an essay on the nuances and paradoxes of femininity. It’s also the portrait of a group of ladies sorted by type and temperament. Miss Amy is sharp-witted and intellectually curious. Miss Jane (Angourie Rice), the princess of the group, is imperious and judgmental. Miss Emily (Emma Howard) is openhearted and obliging. Miss Alicia (Elle Fanning) is sullen and sneaky. Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) applies herself to her duties with an air of disappointment. They find themselves competing for McBurney’s favor as he sets about manipulating their vanities and insecurities, smiling like a tomcat who has stumbled into a cage full of canaries.

Photo

Elle Fanning in “The Beguiled.”Credit
Ben Rothstein/Focus Features

Like many of the characters in Ms. Coppola’s other films, Miss Martha and her charges dwell in a realm apart from the ordinary world, a gilded bubble that is both cocoon and prison. Some of this is a matter of circumstance. Versailles in “Marie Antoinette,” the Chateau Marmont hotel in “Somewhere,” the Tokyo Hyatt in “Lost in Translation” and suburbia in “The Virgin Suicides” and “The Bling Ring” — all of these are environments designed to quarantine their privileged residents from the disorder and misery of life.

But Ms. Coppola also chooses to emphasize this removal, to narrow the perspective of her films by turning her gaze away from certain complications. In the case of “The Beguiled” this means that the war and its causes are banished to the margins. Occasionally a Confederate officer will show up at the gate, and the military situation sometimes arises in conversation, but the conflict is more a premise than a subject. It could be a natural disaster or a zombie-movie epidemic — a background event that provides atmosphere and structure rather than meaning.

For this reason, “The Beguiled” has generated some controversy, in particular for omitting all but the most cursory mention of slavery. While this doesn’t strike me as an unfair criticism — as Corey Atad points out in Slate, an onscreen note explaining that “the slaves left” carries understatement to the point of historical irresponsibility — it also risks applying a standard that may not be entirely relevant to Ms. Coppola’s concerns.

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I say “may not” because her intentions are somewhat opaque. This “Beguiled” (based, like the Siegel-Eastwood version, on Thomas Cullinan’s novel) is a study in moods and implications, picking up difficult, volatile themes and then carefully putting them down again. The earlier film is a bracingly pulpy product of its moment, a time when American movies were breaking free of repressive codes and reveling — sometimes wallowing — in sexual display and rough violence. It’s smutty and disturbing and feverish, rooting around in the muck of the unconscious and the mess of the American past and digging up all kinds of disturbing stuff.

None of that applies to Ms. Coppola’s film, which is less interested in battling repression than in observing its mechanisms and arguing, quietly and unmistakably, for its virtues. Her “Beguiled” is less a hothouse flower than a bonsai garden, a work of cool, exquisite artifice that evokes wildness on a small, controlled scale.

I have called the film a fairy tale but you could also describe it as a horror movie, a quasi-western and a revenge melodrama, perhaps too many things at once. Most effectively, though — and largely thanks to Ms. Kidman’s regal, witty performance — it’s a comedy, a country-house farce about the problems caused by an inconvenient guest.

A version of this review appears in print on June 23, 2017, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Review: ‘The Beguiled,’ Sofia Coppola’s Civil War Cocoon. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe